David Manuel Torres, BS

Research Assistant II

David studied Cognitive Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. While working towards his degree, he worked as a Writing Assistant tutoring incoming freshman who failed to meet the English Language Writing Requirement where he developed a passion for helping others. This led him to become very interested in applied research and motivated him to get hands-on experience. As an undergraduate research assistant in Professor Su-Hua Wang’s Child Development Lab, he learned that he enjoyed working with data. He learned that data can not only be used to validate what you intuitively understand, but it can also be used to discover patterns and make predictions that inform and improve the research process. He then became exposed to the Python programming language, learned about how valuable programming skills are when trying to work with large sets of data, and continues to refine his skillset day-by-day.